Need to highlight a rule, because TripleA doesn’t follow it and it makes a difference.
I’ve been playing new to me players lately, and more than one veteran of the league exclaimed that he’s never been aware of this rule, so I need to announce it.
This is noted in the TripleA game notes, under “general rules for all A&A games that the engine does not do, but you must follow”:
- (NA) Each phase of combat should have all units in that phase fire before any casualty selection occurs, whereas right now in TripleA if air and subs are involved then units might be broken up into smaller groups and casualty selection done for each group.
NA means there is No Available fix for this yet
To do it right you have to roll on forum, or sometimes it’s possible to avoid this by giving your opponent the opportunity to go back and change a choice he didn’t have to choose. If it’s one or two hits and casualties are being demanded out of turn, and it’s obvious what they’ll take, like a hit to the battleship, you can sometimes avoid going to roll by forum. Details on how to roll on forum are below.
Put another way, Triple A is sure to do surprise strikes correctly and to keep subs from hitting planes, and planes without destroyers from hitting subs. That is great, but 2 errors remain:
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The engine requires a casualty choice from sub hits when there is a (enemy) destroyer present. Step 2 of the rulebook for surprise strikes does not apply when a (enemy) destroyer is present because surprise strike capabilities are stuffed by a destroyer. You may have SIGNIFICANTLY different battle results if you think a player has to choose sub casualties and lock those in before seeing all the rest of the attack dice.
(Of course this is the case with surprise strikes, but when the other side (could be attacker or defender) has a destroyer, there is no surprise strike, there is no separate casualty choice)
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The engine requires a casualty choice after rolling for planes only, when those planes do not have an accompanying destroyer. While it is necessary to roll planes separately to distinguish eligible casualty choices (can’t be subs), the opponent does not choose any casualty choices until ALL the dice are rolled.
It is unfortunate that a side-effect of rolling by forum is the detailed dice and casualty history is not in Triple A (but if you want round by round casualties to be in the history, you could always use game notes), but it will be saved on the forum.
The upside is, you can roll the dice old-school, like all 1’s, then all 2’s, seeing the results come in pieces at a time instead of the overwhelming screen of black and red dice all at once 😏
Here is the syntax for rolling dice on the forum in a way that automatically counts your hits.
[dice Xd6<=4|
Where both sides are brackets. I ended with a “pipe” symbol so that the forum won’t think I’m trying to actually roll dice.
Where the “X” is the number of dice to roll, d6 means six-sided die, and <=4 will count all dice rolled that were a 4 or less.
You will enjoy another benefit. Triple A is having you wait for casualty choices from your opponent potentially 2 times per round when you would really only have to wait for 1.
Example:
If I am terrorizing your fleet with 10 subs and 10 bombers, and you have 5 subs, 5 destroyers, and 3 scrambled fighters,
The Triple A engine will correctly roll the 5 defending subs first and the attacker has to choose the surprise strike casualties.
Then the engine will roll the surviving attack subs (10 minus those sunk) but not the bombers and this part is incorrect. TripleA will stop and require casualty choices for the sub hits, so the defender would choose a combination of subs and destroyers. Then TripleA will roll 10 bombers and ask for casualty choice again. The attacking subs and bombers should all be rolled before the defender chooses ANY casualties.
If you circumvent TripleAs error and roll by forum, you could roll all 20 attacking units (less subs lost to defenders’ surprise strikes) and ask for a choice a single time.
The other TripleA error is with defending planes that don’t have a destroyer on their side.
Great example - raid on Zone97 on UK1.
UK attacks with fleet and air, Italy defends with 2 cruisers, battleship, and perhaps 3 scrambled fighters.
After the UK dice, TripleA will roll 3 dice for fighters, and if there is a hit, stop and require a casualty choice from the Allied player. This is absolutely incorrect, the Allied player doesn’t have to choose anything until he sees the rolls from the 3 ships also, then assigns hits accordingly. He can’t choose a (bid) sub to scrambled fighter hits.
Clear as mud? Follow up questions!
